Send for The Specialist

He is The Specialist. He is the man to whom you give the difficult jobs. When the going gets tough, send for Kovacic. When you want the job doing from which the common or garden or superstar violinist will shrink, send for The Specialist.

The most intransigent musical problems reveal their meaning to his patient and probing fingers. In the hands of Kovacic, the most forbidding compositions of this or any other century open themselves to audiences.

And he can take the unfamiliar, the underrated, the ignored, the neglected, the forgotten, and display them to an audience in a way that almost engenders the shock of discovery in his listeners: when he played Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto a few years back, folk were incredulous that they hadn't heard such a major work before; after his performance of Peter Maxwell Davies's concerto, some declared that not until Kovacic played it had it made sense; audiences have reeled from his performances of Benjamin Britten's scandalously neglected Violin Concerto which have revealed the piece to be a work of glittering beauty.

His track record of appearances in Scotland alone over the past decade, where he has featured as soloist with all of the country's orchestras, give an indication of his singular - nay, unique - breadth.

In that period, and at a rate of about one a year, he has played concertos by Kurt Weill, H K Gruber, Nigel Osborne, Samuel Barber, Thomas Wilson, Maxwell Davies, Benjamin Britten, and Robin Holloway.

Most violinists do not play any of these concertos. Moreover, the list represents just the tip of the vast repertoire of twentieth-century concertos Kovacic has under his belt.

And, on top of that lot, he also plays all of the mainstream, traditional repertoire of concertos - he has recorded all the Mozart concertos with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and, in recent times, could have been heard playing Vivaldi's The Four Seasons (the ultimate potboiler) in Canada, and Beethoven's concerto in Ireland.

The Perth Festival this week will witness the full extent of this superb musician's unrivalled versatility: this morning he gives a recital with pianist David Owen Norris, tomorrow he teams up with the Dante Quartet to play string quintets, on Friday he becomes part of an ad hoc quartet, which includes cellist Raphael Wallfisch, and, on Saturday, he's on his own in a solo recital.

And the range of the music he's covering is dazzling, from the unaccompanied music of Bach, sonatas by Mozart and Schubert, string quintets by Bruckner and Brahms, to tough, twentieth-century classics by Webern and Messiaen. And, of course, he is also bringing a whole set of works, some specially written for him, by his contemporary fellow-Austrian composers: Gottfried von Einem, H K Gruber, Friedrich Cerha, and Werner Pirchner.

The Specialist is indeed coming to town. Yet this soft-spoken,

utterly charming and ineffably modest man - who is 55 and looks at least 10 years younger - almost retreats from the limelight of such a description.

''Of course I know I play much more music than the average violinist, but I've never had the feeling of just specialising. Looking at all my dates, there is a good balance between the old and the new.''

What he really means, he explains, is that he's never consciously cultivated the persona of a contemporary music specialist. It has always been in his blood, second nature, to be interested in the new.

And it stems back to his childhood in the Austrian town of Kapfenberg - in the south, near Graz - where, every second year, there was a festival of contemporary arts entitled Cultural Days. To these, the eight-year-old Kovacic - who had already been taught some rudimentary tunes on the violin by his parents - was drawn as though by a magnet.

''The whole avant-garde was there - the musicians, poets, painters, and sculptors. I met all these crazy people and was simply thrilled to get to know - as a young boy - people who actually wrote music. And that was a very strong influence.''

It was an influence to the extent that young Kovacic, as well as progressing on violin and lapping up the chamber music that took place daily in his house, wanted to become a composer himself - an ambition he abandoned later when he began working with the real professionals.

His familiarity with the contemporary music scene - its music and its characters - meant that it held none of the fears for him that have made most violinists (and, as a consequence, their audiences) avoid it like the plague.

''It was quite a natural thing for me; so when I came to Vienna to study, I immediately made contact with living composers and immediately got a place in ensembles for new music.''

In fact he was snapped up by composer/conductor Friedrich Cerha for the legendary and pioneering new music group, Die Riehe, which forged a performing path and left a slipstream that exerted a universal influence that is now a matter of history.

By the time he went to Vienna and began his career proper, Kovacic had already been well-bitten by the performing bug. He'd been playing concertos since he was 13, but it meant much more to him than simply showbusiness.

''I had the feeling that I liked this challenge, but I also needed it. We were not encouraged very much to speak about feelings in the family - a Catholic-Austrian thing. So for me, expressing feelings through music was thus a strong need. I needed to be a musician to express myself, which I was not used to in private life.

''Then, of course, to have

success was very good for me, a great help for all kinds of instabilities in puberty. It was part of my self-esteem.''

There is a refreshing quality of innocence, honesty, and openness about the reflections of this man, characteristics which colour his playing and make it so communicative to his audiences.

He reflects profoundly on the ''private suffering'' caused over the years by the tension between trying to balance, with his wife - a potter - bringing up a young family of four children and dealing with the pressures of sustaining a career that demands you are everywhere else but home.

''I had to learn to handle these things, and I didn't always make the right decisions. I did many things just to earn money, because I had a big family.

''And, as soon as you start this job, you come into connection with a conductor or a pianist and you start to develop projects. And you can't say 'no'.

''Perhaps I should have said no more often. I think I was not so aware, when younger, of the family at home. On the other hand, my whole playing is based on my human experience of family, of seeing the children grow up.

''Most of the ideas I get, looking with new eyes into music, come from my private life.''

And it shows. Whether playing new music or old, there is a sense of sheer experience, of wisdom, that touches the playing of Ernst Kovacic. Hear it in Perth this week.

n Ernst Kovacic concerts: today, City Hall, 11am; tomorrow, Battleby House, 7.30pm; Friday, Scone Palace, 7.30pm; Saturday, St John's Kirk, 11am.